Large-scale military interventions are usually seen as foreign policy options limited to large powers. Yet, Vietnam, Egypt, Syria, and Cuba engaged in costly COIN interventions. Emerging from their own colonial histories, these smaller interveners offer a different perspective to interventions, drawing from their experiences of occupation, revolution, and insurgency. These wars reveal how alliance dynamics shift when the asymmetries in capabilities between allies are less significant than in the interventions examined previously. Smaller interveners rely less on technology and are more likely to maintain modest agendas for development. Vietnam in Cambodia and Egypt in Yemen embedded themselves into the local regimes they were aiding, thus ignoring the norm of promoting the legal sovereignty of local regimes. Syria in Lebanon aided multiple groups to assert its interests, as opposed to commandeering the government in Beirut, in part due to Israel’s efforts to constrain Damascus. Similarly, Cuban forces did not occupy the Angolan state, partly due to the USSR's influence, and partly as Castro’s anti-imperialist stance made the Cubans wary to appear as an occupying force.